Youth And Young Manhood by Kings Of Leon arrived today. I was hoping With Teeth would arrive too, but no such luck. Future Shop’s usually pretty good about shipping early so that things arrive on the release date, but I can imagine how many orders for a new NIN disc there must be.
Still waiting on pre-orders of the new Spoon and Sleater-Kinney too.
Ever have one of those days where you think about something you did at 7:30 this morning and it seems like yesterday?
Goddammit, it’s May. No more hail and freezing temperatures!!
Yeesh, are we ever having good luck with the films we pick at festivals! Hot Docs announced their award winners today, and the audience price went to Street Fight [my review]. While we didn’t rate it as highly as Murderball, it was terrific and a worthy winner.
One minor regret: the winner for best first documentary was The Devil’s Miner, which we were supposed to see but couldn’t because I had Arcade Fire tickets. And while I wouldn’t have passed up that concert for anything, it’s too bad that we had to miss this documentary; sounds like it was a good one.
Changed desks today. Really my whole division is in the process of changing departments and/or desks, so today was a bit of a zoo…everybody running around trying to find everything, locate printers, find missing chairs. I travel light (that is, I keep no paper whatsoever and don’t have much personal junk on my desk), so I was unpacked by 9:00 and got a decent day’s work done. First in a while actually; I’ve been in a real lull lately. I blame the weather. And my chronic laziness, but mostly the weather.
All CDs and loose MP3s are now on the Nomad. Tags have been fixed, files have been renamed, playlists have…not been created. But the random feature’s pretty sweet.
Addictive. So very, very addictive.
I’ve never read the books on which The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (imdb | rotten tomatoes) is based, but my brother had. I guess just by osmosis I’d absorbed some of the names & references (for example, I’ve have a very clear memory of the book So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish), so it all seemed a little familiar to me.
It was entertaining enough. We went with CBGB, who’ve read the books and pointed out that, unless you’ve done so, there were a lot of in-jokes that you just wouldn’t get. Still and all, not bad. I liked how Martin Freeman and Mos Def played Arthur and Ford, though whether they were true to the book is hard to say.
Not great, but an entertaining enough way to spend an evening. I’ll be interested to see how the hardcore geeks fans react.
Man, we went out for dinner and a movie last night with CBGB, and I think I’m still stuffed. We went to Banjara because I’ve been telling CB for months that she had to try the butter chicken. We also piled on the aloo korma, shrimp shahi and beef rogan josh; add in all the naan and rice and papadum and we groaned all the way to the theatre.
Annoying trend: for about 20 minutes before the movie starts they’re now playing all these media clips, like ads, shite music videos, more ads, entertainment news, blah blah wank wank wank.
Anyway, since CBGB are off the sauce for a while and Nellie and I were exhausted, we just came home and fell asleep watching the first few minutes of SNL (which, really, could have been for a number of reasons). Michael tried to kill me in my sleep, that was interesting.
The weather forecast: depressing. Chance of showers every day ’til Wednesday.
Weight: also depressing, though hardly surprising. Still at 220, despite eating my own weight at dinner last night and not exercising at all in the last week.
The last of our Hot Docs selections was The Thin Blue Line (hot docs | imdb | rotten tomatoes), part of the Errol Morris Retrospective. I’ve wanted to see this movie for years, and was happy to find out that it would soon be released on DVD…but then I heard that it was coming to Hot Docs (along with Morris himself), and so I made sure that this made the short list.
Even knowing the impact that the film had, and the results it produced in overturning the conviction of Randall Adams, it was still captivating to watch. The style that Morris essentially created with this film was unlike most documentaries of the time, filled with re-enactments and repetitive imagery — “fetishistic”, as he put it — to the point where some questioned whether it was still a documentary. But as he said last night, it uses the real people to tell a real story, and it provoked a real result in a real man’s life.
We’ve found that in many cases the best moments at Hot Docs come afterward, in the Q&A session. This might have been more true last night than ever before; Morris shared all manner or stories about how the film was made, pieces he left out, and so on, often diverging wildly from one story to another until he’d give five answers for every question. There were many such insights, but two stick out:
Throughout the film I was struck by the number of similarities to the case of the West Memphis Three: the violent crime, the public hunger for an arrest and the shoddy, rushed police work in an attempt to quickly convict, the reliance on extremely suspect witnesses, the overlooking of an obvious suspect, and the subsequent public outrage after exposure by the media (read Mara Leveritt’s Devil’s Knot or watch the documentary Paradise Lost by the same folks who brought you Some Kind Of Monster). If you haven’t seen The Thin Blue Line or you haven’t learned about the West Memphis Three, I urge you to do both. There is a terrifying chance of history not repeating itself.
